Daylight Reviews
Daylight's horror atmosphere starts strong, but repetitive corridors and nonthreatening enemies squander it quickly.
You can't just chuck players in a maze with a ghost and tell them to be scared. Unfortunately this is exactly what Daylight does.
Daylight has neither the creeping sense of psychological dread of Fatal Frame nor the poster man antagonist of Slender, and its reliance on cliche lacks distinction. But if the game's straightforward purpose was simply to panic and upset its player then it is an indisputable success, no matter how cheap the tricks employed.
The least hand-crafted horror game ever, whose legion of design missteps and tepid scares make the worst of an already clichéd set-up.
Daylight hits the right mood at first, but the creepy atmosphere is pushed aside for lame jump scares and hollow gameplay.
A few jump scares left my heart racing, but the overall adventure isn't exciting
Don't be afraid of the dark in the shallow and cliched horror adventure Daylight.
Daylight has moments of fear but too much boredom
Overall I felt as if Daylight was made as a jump-scare machine with a loosely tacked-on plot. I never felt invested in Sarah or cared much for the mysterious man rambling through her phone. In fact, I was more concerned with getting Miss Ghost off my back so she'd stop screaming, more so out of annoyance than fear. Daylight would have benefited from a fresh set of spooks rather than intermittent scares and muddy plot lines, but at the end of the day if you're looking for a cheap thrill you've found it.
Some of the scares in Daylight are genuinely chilling, but their shock value fades quickly. And after the opening hour or so, the hospital itself seems to become a character, which adds a needed layer of interactivity and suspense to the mix. But between dull writing, last-gen graphics, and limited game mechanics, Daylight devolves into nothing more than a glorified maze simulator with mood lighting.
Everything about Daylight converges to create a shining beacon in the survival horror genre and shows a glimmer of hope for its future. If nothing else, one thing is for sure: it reassures you that your heart is working.
Daylight alleges to alleviate the replay problem for games of this type. It certainly does that with its procedurally generated world. The problem is, I don't think they make a compelling enough argument to play again in either the story or gameplay department.
An elaborate version of Pac-Man that isn't anywhere near as scary as it thinks it is.
Daylight is a victim of its most-touted feature. When the random generated items and enemies work, every step carries a palpable sense of dread and unease. But the immersion's lost when the player gets caught in an enemy spawning loop with too few flares is hard to get back. The story's climax works better on paper, and bland visuals just make maze navigation aggravating. The $15 price is also a bit much to ask for what will last most players up to 3 hours without much of a reason to replay it. For the few moments when it all clicks, Daylight is the best we could have hoped for out of the Slender craze. The rest of time will have you remembering why it was a craze to begin with.
The best thing to be said about Daylight, the new procedurally generated horror game from Zombie Studios in Seattle, is that while it's a failure, at least it's an interesting failure
On the first playthrough, it's distracting that Daylight is one-note tonally, unconvincingly written and acted, and unwisely tethers progress to increasingly drearily combing environments for every last scrap of 'oh no something terrible happened here once and everyone's dangerously mental' paperwork. On the second playthrough, it's oppressive. At a guess, self-awareness of this is why the game's so short, but by God another pass on the writing and more care about voice-acting would have made the world of difference.
All in all, Daylight is a respectable addition to the modern horror lineup that packs enough scare into its roughly three hour playtime to justify its modest $15 price tag. The story and scares don't quite stack up to the best of its contemporaries, but the title brings enough of its own charm to the table to make it worth a procedurally generated spin or two.
Daylight is capable of doling out some shocks, but it's far too reliant on a single trick and the writing covers too much well-trodden ground for players to be truly unnerved.
Daylight tries hard to scare you with its soundscape and atmosphere, but unfortunately it treads an all too familiar haunting ground that leaves you sitting impassively in your seat rather than at the edge of it.
Predictable, trite, and convoluted, Daylight is more likely to make you yawn than scream. It's every single horror game ever made, and it's less than the sum of its parts.